Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England

Caroline Bicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351917650
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the intersections of early modern literature and history, Shakespeare and Women's Studies, Midwiving Subjects explores how Shakespearean drama and contemporary medical, religious and popular texts figured the midwife as a central producer of the body's cultural markers. In addition to attending most Englishwomen's births and testifying to their in extremis confessions about paternity, the midwife allegedly controlled the size of one's tongue and genitals at birth and was obligated to perform virginity exams, impotence tests and emergency baptisms. The signs of purity and masculinity, paternity and salvation were inherently open to interpretation, yet early modern culture authorized midwives to generate and announce them. Midwiving Subjects, then, challenges recent studies that read the midwife as a woman whose power was limited to a marginal and unruly birthroom community and instead uncovers the midwife's foundational role, not only in the rituals of reproduction, but in the process of cultural production itself. As a result of recent changes in managed healthcare and of increased attention to uncovering histories of women's experiences, midwives - past and present - are currently a subject of great interest. This book will appeal to readers interested in Shakespeare as well as the history of women and medicine.

Chapter 1

Lurking in the Gossip’s Bowl: Men’s Tales and Women’s Words

One Friday in June, Johane Hammulden, a Watlington midwife, told a story about a birth that she had attended a year earlier, around Whitsuntide 1533. The main characters were Hammulden herself and Mrs. Burgyn, her client; the topic of the tale was the loose behavior of the king’s new wife, Anne Boleyn. During her labor, Burgyn had complimented Hammulden’s midwifery skills by telling her she “might be mydwyff unto the queen of England if it were Quene Kateryn; [but] if it wer Queen Anne she was too good to be her mydwyf, for [Anne] was a hoore and a herlott.”¹ When Hammulden told this story to a group of local men, she may or may not have been aware that the town constable was in their midst. In any case, he and one other man, John Dawson, wasted no time repeating the midwife’s tale to the king’s sheriff, Sir Walter Stonor.

Given that Burgyn’s words against Anne were treasonous, she and her midwife found themselves two days later before the sheriff for an official deposition. The entire story as we know it exists in the form of a letter written by Stonor to the king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell. In response to Dawson’s testimony, “Johane Hammulden confessyd ... that the said Burgyns wyff spake the same words.” Burgyn, obviously eager to clear her name and cast doubt on Hammulden’s testimony, countered with her own tale of gossip between midwife and mother:

upon her examynacyon, [Burgyn] denyith that ever she spake any suche words, butt she saith that there is one Dollsyns wyfe that said abowte Midsomer last past ... that itt was never mery in Inglond sythyns there was iij. Quenes in itt.² And then the said Johane Hammulden sayd there wolde be fewer shortly, which words the said Johane Hammulden denyith.

As this deposition tells it, one midwife’s tale opens the way for multiple stories about the king’s new wife. Both these scenes of gossip between midwife and client took place in June of 1533, just after Anne’s coronation. They focus on the illegitimacy of the royal marriage, and allegedly originate at a time when Anne was visibly pregnant. Three months prior to this deposition, Parliament had supported Henry’s new wife and daughter by passing the Act of Succession that invalidated his marriage to Catherine and named their daughter Mary an illegitimate child. Burgyn’s claim that the new queen was a title-stealing harlot, and the midwife’s comment on the realm’s multiple and changeable queens (“there wolde be fewer shortly”) both contradicted the official story of the royal family that Henry and his advisers were now promoting. Burgyn’s words about the whorish Anne (as midwived by Hammulden to a larger audience) brought the paternity and not just the legitimacy of Henry’s new heir into question. In these stories, then, the birthroom functions as a central site of female-generated stories propagated at the expense of a king’s genealogical fantasy.

What the women actually said is, of course, irretrievable; the tales of legitimacy and paternity they are figured as producing, however, are part of recorded English history. The hearing and the letter provide state-sanctioned spaces for the midwife’s and the mothers’ stories about the new queen’s position and character; although designed to catch them up in their own words, they also record the women’s critiques of Henry’s royal productions and their revisions of “official” Tudor family history. As Jonathon Goldberg has argued in his analysis of early modern voicings of power, patriarchy is not “a simple, dualistic hierarchy of the sexes operating with an all-embracing, hegemonic power. Power entails a disturbing heterogeneity, owned by no one voice.”³ The Hammulden/Burgyn deposition epitomizes this heteroglossia as the women’s stories pervade and complicate both Stonor’s and the realm’s attempts to create an unbroken and linear tale of royal succession.

The inherent elusiveness of these different stories is clear: the deposition, a string of hear-says conveyed in the body of a state letter, exists in a second- and sometimes third-hand form. Burgyn “denyith that ever she spake any suche words” against the queen or the midwife, but does claim that Hammulden had made treasonous comments about Boleyn to another of her laboring clients. The tales that originate in this second birthroom scene are the most obfuscated of all, for “there is no reycorde of neyther of their sayings.” Their unverifiable origins, however, do not detract from the pressure that these prescient birthroom stories put on the narrative as a whole. The midwife’s words pose a particular challenge to the new tale of legitimacy that Henry and his network were attempting to enforce and inscribe. Hammulden’s mysterious statement that there would be fewer queens shortly points to a truth that every English subject well knew—that the royal family was a revisable body. No doubt Burgyn attributed these words to the midwife in self-defense, knowing that the authorities would read witchcraft and treason into Hammulden’s royal predictions; still, the comment comes to life in the letter as a midwife’s tale, carrying with it the weight of popular opinion and recent history. Appropriately, it would be stories of Anne’s harlotry, produced for a larger audience by her midwife, that eventually would contribute to her fall.⁴

At issue here is not whether midwives knew more than anyone else about a woman’s behavior or a child’s father, but rather why their stories were coming under increased scrutiny in the early modern period. Despite its inherent obscurity, the “truth” about marital fidelity and paternity was increasingly codified under Henry. Trials and depositions like this one were designed to eliminate the spread of any speech that contradicted the king’s newest version of the royal line. Henry’s specific concerns, however, found expression in a larger movement already underway in the sixteenth century to regulate the words that passed between midwife and mother. Although midwifery licensing was likely in place earlier in the century, Eleonor Pead took the first recorded midwife’s oath in England before an ecclesiastical court in 1567. In it, she had to swear to ensure the correct naming of the child’s father and to prevent the replacing of the child (or no child) with another’s progeny. As I discussed in the introduction, the oath was part of the Poor Laws’ efforts to track down delinquent fathers; at the same time, it also connects to a larger set of concerns about paternity and the obscured origins of a man’s most recognized claim to potency.⁵

In his study of early modern masculinity, Mark Breitenberg defines masculine identity in terms of its relation to patrilineal culture, “the ‘resources’ men inherit, including his status, and what he is able to pass on to his children.”⁶ He cites Calvin’s statement on female chastity and its connection to property and social position as an example of how this masculinity depended upon knowledge of one’s wife and child: “what else will remain safe in human society if license be given to bring in by stealth the offspring of a stranger? To steal a name which may be given to spurious offspring? And to transfer to them property taken from lawful heirs?”⁷ The midwife’s oath makes explicit that the name of a father (and, following Breitenberg’s definition, a man’s masculinity) could be fashioned by the words of the mother and the midwife. And, ultimately, it was the midwife who determined which genealogical tale, with its attendant privileges or stigmas, would be delivered to a wider audience. This emphasis on regulating the name of the “right and true” father and on swearing that the child is the named father’s offspring exposes a specifically male concern about the birth attendant’s supposed proximity to what is “true.” A seventeenth-century version of the midwife’s oath displays further attempts by men to regulate the production and dissemination of a child’s origins. It instructs the midwife as follows: “You shall not consent, agree, give or keep counsell, that any woman be delivered secretly of that which she goeth with.” Also, should the midwife know of any other midwife breaking the premises of the oath, “you shall forthwith detect open to shew the same to me [the bishop], or my Chancellor for the time being.”⁸ This official attempt to discover and then redirect the matter of birthroom conferences from women’s ears to men’s exposes a fear that women have greater knowledge in matters of paternity and either alter, spread, or hide it. Whereas European midwives historically served as witnesses to protect the mother from allegations of infanticide, they were now expected to protect the interest of the father, to affirm his identity as patriarch—or, in the case of bastards, to affirm the authority of the state.⁹

Female birth attendants also compromised a man’s position as patriarch when they moved into his household: they edged the husband out of his spouse’s bed, sitting around it as the woman of the house entertained them both during and up to a month after the birth.¹⁰ Most importantly for our discussion here, the mother and her female attendants reminded the husband of his inferior powers when it came to telling stories about his spouse and her offspring.¹¹ Their tales could initiate a story about a man’s patriarchal identity (in its most literal sense) that might not match his own. Whether or not they knew more than the husband or the state, they witnessed and (in the case of midwives) testified to what few men could lay claim to having seen or known.

The same institutions and individuals that sometimes denounced these female-generated tales, however, also relied upon them. The midwife’s testimony reminded alleged fathers that, in a world where proof of fidelity is elusive, it was her speech that often defined the paternity of their wives’ offspring. In 1617 John Davies of Hereford wrote “Of Luscus his great Faith, and small Performance.” The epigram places the power to identify paternity squarely with the midwife: “Luscus, at last, hath got his Wife with Child, / For, tis like him, her bribed Midwife sweares: / Which he beleeves.”¹² The midwife easily misguides this would-be patriarch by leading him to believe he has proven himself a masculine man through his sexual “Performance.” Breitenberg argues that epistemological uncertainty about female sexuality formed the basis of what he terms “anxious masculinity” in the early modern period, an anxiety that “is so often figured as an interpretive crisis, specifically a crisis in interpretive knowledge about women and their sexuality.”¹³ Masculinity, in this sense, intersects with paternity at the site of the reproductive female body, and the midwife appears to mediate the interpretation and production of all three.

As this chapter will explore, the midwife’s open, “on-the-record” narratives were not the only tales to trigger male anxiety; she also appears in early modern texts as obscuring a child’s parentage and a wife’s sexuality. In both cases, her stories foreground her power as a producer of paternity and fidelity, a role that leads us to the final section of this chapter: her physiological control over men’s penises and tongues—the anatomical origins of their tales.

Gossiping Midwives and the Patriarch’s Tale

I jest to Oberon and make him smile

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,

Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;

And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,

In very likeness of a roasted crab,

And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,

And on her withered dewlop pour the ale.

The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

Sometime for three-f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Women and Gender in the Early Modern World
• title
• copy
• Content
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: Midwiving Subjects
• 1 Lurking in the Gossip’s Bowl: Men’s Tales and Women’s Words
• 2 “Sometimes the Midwives break it”: Pressing Maids and Making Women
• 3 “As God makes, so the Midwife shapes”: Crowning Heads and Reforming English
• 4 Stealing the Seal: Baptizing Women and the Mark of Kingship
• 5 “(Miraculous) Matter”: Lucina at Ephesus and the Churching of Women
• Epilogue: Lucina in London
• Selected Bibliography
• Index